“Adults always say ‘That can’t happen’ or ‘that’s impossible’ …But we know that anything can happen. That’s why we’ve managed to survive.”

-Sho, from vol. 3 of The Drifting Classroom, by Kazuo Umezu

After a furious row with his mother before heading off late to his school in Tokyo, Sho Takamatsu’s morning already isn’t going well. But it’s about to get a lot worse: as he arrives there’s an explosion, an earthquake, then something even more extraordinary occurs.

As they pick themselves up and dust themselves off, the school’s inhabitants realise they are alive and (for the moment) unharmed. But the school seems to have moved. Suddenly, appallingly, there’s nothing outside the school gates except a barren, trackless wasteland. Where has the school gone to? What happened to the rest of the world? And what happens now?

That it’s the adults who crack first under the pressure of its bizarre and brutal premise is just one of the things I love about The Drifting Classroom. By the end of vol. 1 the school’s teachers and other staff are already turning in panic on themselves and, mercilessly, their students. But traumatized or psychotic adults are *just one* menace that Sho and his schoolmates will have to face. To make it to the end of all eleven books of this story these unlucky young people will need to work together to survive starvation, disease, a succession of weird and terrifying monsters – and each other.

The Drifting Classroom was first published in Japan (to instant acclaim) in the 1970s, but while reading it I couldn’t help thinking about two real events that had occurred just a couple of decades before. Writer/artist Kazuo Umezu was born in 1936: when he was the age of the children he writes about in this story he, too, witnessed living cities being suddenly and brutally replaced by poisonous wastelands when the USA dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

I can’t give The Drifting Classroom a straight recommendation: parts of the story seem sudden and random, and the constant parade of hardships its young characters are forced to endure (OK, so what’s going to go wrong for them now? -No! That, too? You’re KIDDING!) sometimes made the reading experience tip over, for me, from tragedy and horror into camp and farce. But whenever I came close to giving up on this series something brilliant always pulled me back. As with some classic old horror movies, if you can look past the wonky bits of The Drifting Classroom you’ll find a wild and audacious story, packed with moments of jaw-dropping amazingness that this reader, at least, has never seen anywhere else. The context, outside the story, for the stoic way Sho and his friends face their tribulations adds a fascinating extra dimension. Well: it does for me anyway. ;D

My manga odyssey continues. More soon.

Sam

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